As a black person hearing people compare black power to the KKK, I have a few words on TV matter.

Here’s the thing. Invoking Black Pride is us punching up at CENTURIES of (usually white) boots on our necks and celebrating our achievements.

Invoking “White Pride” usually means some heavy dangerous shit is going down and someone is going to get hurt, destroyed, or killed.

People who get nervous when the former comes up think we’re going to wake up in the morning and do the same shit they did to us—which is untrue. We don’t have a fucking death wish. They’re not going to listen to reason, not for a while.

If you can honestly believe in a “We Are One Race” argument, you’re touched by the hand of privilege. (This is also a classic version of the “I don’t see color” argument that Black America is getting tired of hearing, but that’s another rant.)

I cannot. I am not. It is exhausting to argue with the people who really and truly believe this, because when there is no way to offer the perspective—despite trying—all you get is frustration.

If you argue that racial dividers are manmade and only really tribal markers made to divide us, I’ll agree with you—and I will remind you that one half of my family’s “tribe” was yanked from its home continent to be used as slaves and had its culture beaten out of it, while the other half has been nigh exterminated, both by the “division/tribe” called “White Man.” “We are all one race” in response to someone bringing up injustice only serves to silence. And if you haven’t noticed, people are very tired of having people use the privilege of being a step up in the form of a boot on the neck.

Yes, this is on my mind a lot. It’s a thing that I have in the back of my mind most days. Every time I get a “You don’t sound [this word is always in a stage whisper] Black.” When a new person gets promoted over me. When I get passed on a hire because “I don’t fit the aesthetic” and I meet the new hire, with perfect alabaster complexion.

In today’s world, the way it works, “We are all one race” only applies practically in a gaming group or a video game. It does not advance discussion of the problems that exist. It pushes them under the rug. I see where people are trying to get at with it, but it will never, ever work. Not in the world we live in.

I occasionally jump in on things that my friends on Facebook have weighed in on. Today, a person was lamenting that their now ex-girlfriend has apparently gone on birth control (referred to hereafter as BC) when she apparently wasn’t before. The original poster seemed to be, to put it bluntly, rather butthurt about the whole deal: he bought into the conservative fallacy of being on BC = promiscuity.

In all likelihood, the odds are she was on it in the first place, so I took a devil’s advocate position on the whole thing, explaining that hormonal contraception is used not only for contraception, but also a form of HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for reproductive issues.

I for one went on birth control around the time right after seeing my now on-again first boyfriend: mostly because it would give me relief from the migraines. (What they don’t tell you about it? YOU GET MOAR BEWBS.) The fact that it gave me free license to jump his bones (didn’t happen, I kept getting cockblocked) was a bonus.

The point is, there’s more than one reason to go on BC. And that decision should be up to the woman in question. NOT a bunch of white-haired old men who think that the body has ways to shut down unwanted pregnancies as in the case of incest and [trigger word redacted]. The fact is, most of the government trying to regulate what we do to our bodies are men—who therefore have a barely-working knowledge of how making babies work in the first place—Todd Akin, anybody?—and don’t seem to bother with science at all. Look at the conservatives’ positions on the subject, and you see a lot of DIVINE VIRTUE and GOD’S WILL and ABOMINATION AGAINST NATURE and AGAINST THE HOLY WORD!

You don’t see…what’s it called—oh, right. SCIENCE. You don’t see the medical experts’ views. You don’t see doctors. You don’t see internists. YOU DON’T SEE WOMEN. Or at least, you don’t see women when you’re not looking inside of Mitt Romney’s infamous binders. Pretty much, the one segment of the population that has anything to do with this whole thing is being silenced. The right to do to our bodies what we want to do, even in cases of improvement of our own health, we’re stuck under the thumb of conservative pols and the damn Church.

And I’m not comfortable with a bunch of old men who won’t let girls join their club trying to tell me what to do with my own huevos internales at every chance they get.

An ancient institution should not be taking the place of a trained medical professional. Church, I don’t turn around and tell you how to massage your prostates. Don’t tell me how to make my ovaries behave, and DON’T go around sticking lighted wands all up in the Promised Land just because you think that a cluster of cells that has not yet even developed a rudimentary nervous system should have sole control over what I do.

That isn’t pro-life. That’s pro-birth. After the birth, where are these people? “Oh, we’re not going to provide assistance to you, you should have known better than to get pregnant in the first place. Oh, and spermicides and condoms and stuff like that is also the devil so no you can’t have it unless you want to go to hell and you don’t want that now do you, silly woman?”

We’re not baby machines. Stop treating us like baby machines. Get out of our laws. For fuck’s sake, start treating women like PEOPLE, you old dustbags. Until then, I’ll just travel about until I can get the medical help I need for my hormonal issue.

Fitly Written:

Firstly: The next 100 Things post will be up sometime Friday evening. There is no guarantee that I will work that day, but there is no guarantee that I won’t either. In either case, there will be much work done with the upper body and I will need a GENEROUS nap before I do any writing. I didn’t work today, but I decided to work out today. *listens carefully* Ah, there’s the ever-present question:

“DO YOU EVEN LIFT?”

Actually, thanks to my knee, it’s all I CAN do. I have the feeling that by the time June hits, I am going to be amusingly off-proportion.

Despite my crap leg, I have to try to stay in passable condition for working, and thus, I have to make sure I do a few things a week. Depending on how money is, this may include a few mall walks—I had the money to pay my rent and…that was it.

HOLY CRAP, DOOD

I was at work today picking up my scrawny little paycheck when I found out that there would be a Comic Con in my area in a very short time. It’s a little more than the usual price for Anime Central in Chicago, but the fact is that I might not be able to go for a reason completely irrelevant to money—my damn leg could sideline me before I get the chance to do anything else. In fact, not even the SIDEWALKS, at last check, were accessible worth a damn—I was gimpy as hell last year for the Distant Worlds event, and the steps were agony. If I’m lucky, the overflow will jam up the hotels to the point even our location’s full up.

(If you’re a con chaser, consider coming down/up—for one, Stan Lee’s gonna be at this one; for another, if you haven’t had St. Louis style pizza, you’ve GOTTA. The provel cheese may be a love-it-or-hate-it affair, but the crust—whoa, MAN, that buttery crispy thin crust is delicious.)

I used to be an adventurer like you, until I took a hotel to the knee

I’ll be perfectly honest with you guys: right now my pain is NOT managed. I’m out of the prescription I got at the initial injury, and the antispasmodic I take is nowhere near as effective as it used to be—which is to say it’s fine if I need to sleep, but it doesn’t do much beyond stopping the unrelated hand twitch (it MIGHT be related to the fact that it’s literally the same bottle as the last fill, stashed an squirreled away in case of such an emergency as this). …you probably have no idea how hard it is to type with one finger constantly going “twitchytwitchytwitch” every time you try and remember how the word pfefferneuse is spelled.

I’ve tried to climb stairs (HAHA NOPE) and the left knee just isn’t having it. For the first few hours of movement in the day, I’m pretty mobile, but it doesn’t take long for me to be reduced to dragging the thing around like some sort of dead weight—and the direction of the stairs, up versus down, makes no difference.

So my erratic presence is therefore explained. It’s going to be a while before I’m reliably present anywhere, as I focus on training my knee to stay in place while waiting to hear back from my doctors.

Best guess for acceptable management: Monday. Saturday at the earliest. I don’t have much in the way of painkillers—some off-brand Excedrin that may or may not be expired, a few borrowed naproxen tabs, a few prescription-strength ones whose potency and freshness are up for debate—I’m going to be pushing my luck here.

Appropriate Wintertime Jubilations: A holiday greeting, once purely tongue-in-cheek, that a friend currently serving the country came up with when it was realized that the usual group contained three different flavors of Christian, a Daoist, a couple of agnostics, one atheist, at least three pagans, and a black chick who actually acknowledged the newest of the holiday seasonal festivities.

The fact of the matter is, saying “Merry Christmas,” while traditional, can be a bit exclusionist. No other faith has its holidays so publically acknowledged—well, excepting Hanukkah, and we have Adam Sandler to thank for that. The above greeting began as a kind of hipster PC greeting—and somewhere along the way my little group started taking it fairly seriously.

A few fairly horrendous things have happened this year, to me as well as other parts of the country (Hell, I feel like my trouble is small potatoes to some of the things that are going on), and any holiday greeting seems to feel a little bit forced as long as you have no idea that something horrendous has happened to someone else. The nation reels from mass killings and a war that we’ve all been tired of for half a decade; I’m still battling that bothersome thing in my head that goes by an acronym that, when read as printed, sounds like a rim shot. (Seriously, actually pronounce ‘PTSD’ and tell me it doesn’t sound like a rim shot.)

However, a bit of Pagan!perspective helps me to remember what this season means (besides cold feet, warm cocoa and entirely too much food). As originally observed, the general temporal area we’re in right now is a chance to observe the triumph of the light over dark; the year wanes, but the light waxes, and we prepare for the veritable explosion of life that awaits the warming of the land. This light is not just a literal light: the sensation also ties to the body, as anyone suffering from seasonal-affective can tell you—we feel good when there is more light. …well, most of us. I’ve been battling a migraine that has me literally recoiling when I sense light. ANYWHO, the point is that when the light returns, we can be like the green sector of our planet’s life—renew and rejuvenate while the days lengthen. With this sort of thing going through my head, it’s easy to forget atrocities like the shootings and the utterly reprehensible things that a man of god can spout about a TINY segment of the population.